Near field communication (NFC) is a short-distance radio connection technology and a radio frequency identification (RFID) based technology, which implements short-distance communication between electronic devices using magnetic induction. With increasing popularity of the NFC technology, a lot of electronic products, such as printers, television (TV) sets, sound boxes, mobile phones, and cameras, have already integrated an NFC function.
An NFC device is mainly formed by the following three functional entities: a device host (DH), an NFC controller (NFCC), and a security element (SE). The DH is responsible for management of the NFCC, such as initialization, configuration, and power management; the NFCC is responsible for physical transmission of data through a radio frequency interface and an antenna; and the SE can provide a secure executing environment for an NFC application program. A logical interface is defined at an NFC control interface (NCI) for communication between the DH and the NFCC. Communication may be performed between the DH and the NFCC using an NCI protocol. In addition, communication may be performed between the NFCC and the SE using a communications protocol such as the Host Controller interface (HCl) protocol or Single Wire Protocol (SWP).
An NFC device is generally in a single host architecture. In the single host architecture, an NFCC is connected to a DH only, but is not connected to an SE; the DH is connected to the SE; and a host of the NFCC is the DH and the NFCC is controlled only by the DH. With development of the NFC technology, a multi-host architecture is proposed at present. In the multi-host architecture, an NFCC is connected to a DH and one or more SEs separately; and the NFCC is a shared resource, both the DH and the SE that are connected to the NFCC are hosts of the NFCC, and both the DH and the SE can control the NFCC to perform NFC radio frequency communication. The prior art, however, does not provide a mechanism for the NFCC to be controlled by multiple hosts to perform radio frequency communication under the multi-host architecture.